Why Human Rights Are Necessary, and Why We Have to Keep It Honest

Correction: Apparently, the videos and RCTV are for real. h/t to CatherineCC

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So. Is this what the religious right wants?

I’m pretty sure that the above video is a parody, although there is no statement of the sort, and RealCatholicTV does exist. In their store, you’ll find bumper stickers like “Obama: He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy” (which is actually really bloody offensive, when you remember how that last word was used in the context of the US civil rights struggle and prior), and positive reviews used to hawk movies like “The Matrix” through their Amazon.com pay-per-click links.

I consider this a harmful parody, though, since there are certainly people out there with beliefs along this line, and who will find validation and motivation in even some of its most extreme statments. And if someone does in fact buy and receive bumper stickers like the aforementioned, that will generate a lot of stress, invalidation and understandable anger in the people they’re designed to offend. It also helps undermine LGBT people when we point to things like this as characteristic of anything, and then they turn out to be hoaxes.

But in fact, far-right public religious leaders have in fact mused about criminalizing LGBT people (i.e. Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, Bob Emrich of Emmanuel Baptist Bible Church in Maine, and Brian Fischer of the American Family Association), have bemoaned that LGBT groups are allowed to organize or that abortion doctors (and even mothers) aren’t tried for murder, and conservatives were so angry about a group like Acorn helping get poor, disenfranchised, usually minority people to the polls so they could vote that they faked a scandal and used that to have the organization thoroughly destroyed. The very real Molotov Mitchell regularly defends things like Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill (which would put to death among others “repeat offenders”) as the “right thing to do,” among other extreme beliefs supposedly sanctioned by god. They will often get caught commissioning bogus studies, distorting existing data or designing polls to support their views — and if the answer data doesn’t end up being what they wanted, they’ll often change the questions. There’s ample evidence of mainstream extremists (as bizarre as that sounds) wanting to further disenfranchise and deny rights to marginalized people.

The words and behaviours of the far right would stand on their own without RCTV-style hoaxes making it seem like nobody seriously entertains those ideas and that any such fears are unfounded.

Human rights protections are necessary because these attitudes exist — and so long as there isn’t something in place telling people that they have to play nice, there will be discrimination and hatred, even blatantly so.

BTW, there’s also a “response:”

RCTV: stop mocking and undermining the fight against a very real problem.

It’s not often that our enemies cast off the cloak of civility they normally hide behind and show their true feelings and intentions. It’s a good thing, imho. We’re getting advances in civil rights, it’s important to not become complacent.

Wow. I feel like I’m back in grade school! Although actually I don’t remember any priest or sister going as far as this guy (or organization) goes. He seems to have missed the fact that actual western civilization started when people gave the finger to those Catholic monarchs.

There’s a lot of revisionist history in there, such as when he says it’s because of the Catholic church that we came out of the Dark Ages (when it was the Catholic church that was the Dark Ages — the Reformation and Renaissance, two movements the Vatican opposed — ended the Dark Ages). Or (and I forget which video it is) where he says that Nazi scientists developed GRS (one of the first acts of the Nazis was to destroy the Institute for Sexual Sciences and all of their records / research).

THE DEATH OF THE TRANSGENDER UMBRELLA: "If you've traveled anywhere among trans or LGBT blogs in the past year or three, you've inevitably come across an ongoing battle over labels, and particularly "transgender" as an umbrella term. It seems to be a conflict without end, without middle ground and without compromise..."

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